Ep. 9: Sneak Peek: AEC Talent Acquisition Unleashed

What's the secret sauce to building exceptional architecture, engineering, and construction teams?

 In this episode, Emily and Jen offer a sneak peek into insider strategies and exclusive insights that promise to revolutionize your approach to recruitment and help you navigate the AEC talent landscape.

 Whether in the early stages of growth or leading a mature organization, Episode 9 promises valuable takeaways to elevate your team-building efforts, featuring SN's very own Talent Acquisition Manager, Ali Wade.

 Prepare to transform how you approach talent acquisition in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. Don't miss our next conversation as we unpack the trends, challenges, and solutions shaping the AEC talent landscape. Tune in and stay ahead in the race for groundbreaking growth!

🔔 Don't miss out! Subscribe to Groundbreaking Growth on your favorite podcast platform. Let's ignite growth, shape the future of the AEC industry, and redefine what's possible. Are you ready for some groundbreaking growth? Let's dive in! 🚀💼

Transcript

[Opening Credits]

Emily Lawrence: Hi, everyone; it's Jen, and Emily here, your hosts for the Groundbreaking Growth podcast. We are excited today to continue the conversation with our amazing guest, Emily Preston, that we had on last week.

Jen Knox: Yeah, so Emily's story resonated with a lot of people, that growth journey from a new company to a few years, and the thing we kind of bounced back and forth with talking about is recruiting and how you have to be intentional about the team members you're bringing on, especially in those early years. But throughout your growth as an organization, whether or not you're in a more mature phase from a corporate structure, it is all about the people that are on your team. So, how do we be intentional about talent acquisition? I think it's a struggle that we're seeing across the industry as a whole.

Emily Lawrence: Yeah, we hear that all the time from clients and peers in the industry. We are just facing a hard time in terms of talent. We have clients that have open racks for months and are having a hard time finding talented people to fill positions across the board, really in all age demographics.

Jen Knox: Yeah, and I think we try and always take a look at the trends that are facing us as an industry, what's coming down the pike. We know IIJ will continue to push work towards companies in the years to come. And I know there are already forecasted shortages of require of engineers, architects, etc., and construction professionals to be able to execute that work. So it's a trend we're going to continue seeing, for sure.

Emily Lawrence: Yeah, and as we were talking with Emily about her growth process and how she is finding people and needs to find really good talent to grow her company, we thought that would be an amazing next episode to continue that conversation of how are we growing and what are we seeing as the trends. And we are very lucky to have an amazing Talent Acquisition Manager on our team here at Stambaugh Ness. She's awesome. She is absolutely an emerging leader, but just an established leader as well in her own right. We're very excited to have her on our team, and we thought she would be the

perfect person to in our conversations with her and how much knowledge she has to dive into this topic and give us something to think about.

Jen Knox: Yeah, and it's like when Emily, you, and I jumped on a call with her name's Ali a few months back. I just loved her energy around it, like her thought process and philosophy, and talent acquisition is tough. Especially if you're a small mid-firm, you may not have a dedicated team member in talent acquisition. Right? You may have an H.R. Professional handle talent acquisition, but Ali will have a wealth of knowledge of those key things that we need to be thinking about as leaders when we're trying to recruit talent and how we connect with them. What are their main sticking points? What are the things that they're really looking for from an employer?

So, I'm super excited for our conversation with her and hope that our listeners can really gain some key insights that they can apply at their organizations too.

Emily Lawrence: Yeah. Oh, I have no doubt there will be so many insights and takeaways from Ali. In general, even with our brief conversation with her when we were talking through the employer brand and some of the recruiting aspects of that, I learned things I had never heard of before. So within that conversation, I think when you come up through the industry, there just are specific functions that aren't operations-related that need some expanding and education. And I think that this is an exciting topic to continue the conversation and learn about it further. So yeah, we're very excited to have her on.

Jen Knox: Yeah, it will be good. And if anyone has any questions or things, topics related to talent acquisition that we can bring up with Ali, our next episode with her will drop in two weeks from now. So if you've got any burning questions, etc., feel free to reach out to us either on LinkedIn or through our contact information at Stambaugh Ness. But we'd love to be able to ask some specific questions that our listeners are eager to get answered.

Emily Lawrence: Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, thank you, Jen. We are just more than excited to have this conversation in two weeks. We hope that you join us for listening. It'll be absolutely worthwhile.